From time to time, a person or entity may wish to acquire information regarding a person, group, entity, item, location, event, or trend. For purposes of this application, the term “target” will be used to collectively describe a person, group, entity, item, location, event, trend or anything else about which a person wishes to acquire information.
While there are many processes available for gathering information about a target, one source is a physical copy of a publication such as a book, magazine, journal, newspaper, or similar to acquire information. However, such publications may be time-consuming to locate and may not address a specific topic about which the person is interested in obtaining information. Also, because of production time required for publishing paper copies, the information about a topic may or may not be up-to-date.
Of course, other information resources are faster and easier to locate using a computer system, for example, via the World Wide Web (“Internet” or “Web”). Wikipedia is one such resource. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that permits volunteers to submit articles. Advantageously, Wikipedia and other Internet resources do not require a long production time. In general, a person may prepare content and upload it to the Internet within minutes. However, while a person may find a Wikipedia article or other Internet resource related to a general overview of a topic or a narrow range of information on the topic, the person may or may not be able to find an Internet resource related to a specific topic or a specific detail of a topic.
Another limitation of Wikipedia and other Internet resources is that, even though the technology exists to permit speedy updating of a resource upon availability of new information, the resources often are not updated on any schedule. For example, the author/contributor of the content may have moved on to another project or not learned about the new information available.
In addition, even if the person finds an up-to-date Internet resource related to the specific topic about which the person wishes to obtain information, the person often does not know the accuracy of the information. Accuracy of information may be assessed by determining the primary source of the information, but certain Internet resources do not identify the primary source or identify only general information about the primary source. For example, Wikipedia articles identify the contributors to an article by an Internet Protocol address configured to identify a device or by a contributor's username, which may include a pseudonym, nickname, or a full name. Even if the username identifies the full name of the contributor, the consumer may not know what authority the person has to write on the topic without doing additional background research.
Consumers who wish to obtain accurate information often take additional steps to verify the accuracy of the information obtained on the Internet, which may be a time consuming process. Consumers engage in the verification process until: they believe they have located the primary source of the content; or have located some authoritative confirmation that the topic content is accurate; or simply run out of time. The overall lack of confidence in the accuracy of much of the content found on the Internet makes it a less reliable source of information relative to traditional sources.
At times, the full scope of information that a user wishes to obtain regarding a topic is not found in any one resource. In such instances, a consumer may identify two or more resources that contain some information about the topic. Then, the consumer may compare, combine, or otherwise synthesize the information obtained from two resources. However, to obtain an accurate synthesized result, the consumer must complete the verification process for each of the at least two sets of information.
Even if the consumer obtains two sets of verified information, there may be an additional question about whether the two sets of information are compatible for comparison or synthesis. For example, if a consumer wishes to compare the holiday season sales of a first retail store to the holiday season sales of a second retail store, the consumer may obtain two sets of information such as, (1) the number of vehicles in the parking lot of the first retail store during one day in the holiday season and (2) the number of vehicles in the parking lot of the second retail store during a day in the holiday season. However, if the vehicle count at each store did not occur on the same day, the value of the comparison may be limited. For example, if there was a snow storm (during which fewer people shopped at any store) on the day the count was done at the first store, but no snow storm on the day the count was done at the second store, any difference between the counts may be the result of the snow storm and not the relative success of each store. Accordingly, steps must be taken to account for differences in how and when the information was obtained.
For purposes of this application, the term “vehicles” includes at least cars, automobiles, minivans, full sized vans, trucks, motorcycles, trains, planes, and any other machine that permits transporting at least one person from a first location to a second location.
In other circumstances, certain specific and verified information about the target is not available, even by combining multiple sources of information. Instead, the information that a person wishes to obtain may need to be derived from observing the target directly or calculated using observable information obtained from observing the target. The observable information may be combined with or compared to contextual information to generate certain desired information.
At times, observable information about the target may be obtained in many different ways. For example, because certain targets may have multiple components or may be mobile, obtaining observable information may require capturing information in multiple locations or at multiple points in time. One way to obtain such information is to record the target for location-remote or time-shifted viewing using a recording device.
For purposes of this application, a “recording device” is any machine configured to generate a representation—including a visual representation or audio representation—of a target. A visual representation may be a representation of the target as of a date including in some expression such as graph, table, or chart. A recording device may be configured as a camera or a rendering instrument. Examples of a camera include a still camera, digital camera, video camera, webcam, camera integrated with a mobile phone, traffic camera, security camera, satellite camera, aerial mapping camera, aerial laser measurement (LiDAR), aerial or satellite radar measurement (SAR), aerial thermal mapping (heat), vehicle-mounted cameras (Google Streetview, or other views generated from car, truck, van, train, helicopter, airplane, space shuttle, or boat, to name a few), and can include audio recording devices or used with pneumatic tubes to measure car movements.
A rendering instrument may include any instrument by which a person may record or have recorded at least some observable information and thereby document this information relevant to the target. A rendering instrument may rely on human observations or input related to the topic. Examples of such instruments are pen, pencil, marker, ink, paper, paint, paintbrush, canvas, surface, tablet, mobile device, stylus, program used to prepare a digital rendering, or other such instruments.
While many types of recording devices may provide a representation, there are certain challenges associated with obtaining one or more representations of a selected target, and extracting relevant information from the representations and calculating the desired information.
One challenge associated with obtaining observable information regarding a selected target may include accessing the location of the target. Certain known systems address this challenge by setting up a recording device and operating such a device continuously, automatically, or remotely. However, if the person wishes to obtain observations regarding a large target or multiple targets that occur outside the range of a single recording device, positioning and maintaining multiple recording devices may be cost-prohibitive.
Other known systems address the challenge of obtaining desired representations by acquiring—including by way of purchase or license—from one or more third party sources one or more already-existing representations of a selected target. However, already-existing representations may not depict the entirety of the desired target or may not include representation creation information. For purposes of this application, the term “metadata” includes data regarding when the representation was created, from what angle the representation was created, in what weather conditions the representation was created, and other information relevant to the circumstances pursuant to which the representation was created.
In addition, acquiring information via already-existing representations may include searching for or requesting images regarding a target from a third party and then requiring human review of the images to identify information in those images. However, known procedures are often limited in the search/request parameters by which images may be found. Accordingly, while many images may be identified to the searcher, only some of the images may be relevant. The greater the number of irrelevant or useless images that are provided to the searcher, the more time and resources the searcher must utilize to find and be able to review the relevant images.
Some known procedures attempt to deal with irrelevant or useless images by providing a feedback mechanism that requests additional images to increase the sample size. However, while the feedback mechanism may provide additional images, because the search/request parameters may still be limited in scope or number, the additional pictures may have no higher likelihood of being relevant.
In certain circumstances, two or more observations may be necessary to provide the desired information, and accordingly, two or more representations may need to be created. In certain circumstances, the calculations of the desired information may be more accurate if the two or more representations are comparable. If not, then the content extracted from the representations must be balanced for comparability. However, as described above, obtaining comparable representations may be difficult. In addition, known techniques for balancing the comparability of the content extracted are often imprecise.
Even when comparable information is obtained, additional limitations are associated with displaying information in a quick and easy-to-understand format.
Clearly, there is a demand for an improved system and methods of obtaining, distilling, verifying, balancing, synthesizing, and coding information. The present invention satisfies this demand.